Awards: 3rd Place (Shared) in Memar Award, in the section of residential category, 2015

The street façade is dynamic and movable that changes by apartment dwellers. This double Skin façade tries to have communication with the city, is constructed of a one transparent layer and one movable wooden layer. The saturated woods with 2.40 meters height are located in a rail. This part is designed and made by the cooperation of smothery and casting team during a year of continuous work with low cost. The wooden layer is controlled manually by hand.This second layer’s measure of openness and closing is depended on the users’ need for light, privacy and view. In the facade that fronts the garden, the modular flower boxes shape the balustrade of the balcony. This green layer is irrigated by the collection of building used water and rain in a smart drop irrigation procedure.

Local materials and recycled ones from the existing building before construction are used in the construction of the project. Railroad timbers and leftover bricks from the previous structure were washed, processed and used in covering the floor andwalls of the yard after 40 years. The materials used in construction of the project such as wood, bricks, iron plates and stones are considered as environment friendly materials and are acquired from local resources. The double skin façade facing the street would prevent the heat exchange between indoors and outdoors.

The outer shell is a wooden skin with the ability to control the natural lighting and the inner shell is a glass curtain of double-glazed windows providing the indoors with the daylight brightness and nighttime privacy in combination with the outer shell. As mentioned before we have focused on the idea of the integrating the landscape with the greenery covering the balconies in each floor. With having the water issue of Tehran in our minds we have added a water harvesting system to the project to collect the rainwater from the roof ; to be used for irrigation after filtration.

Location

The project is situated in a land with 20 meters width and 50 meters length and is located on the south of a 20 meters width street. The 30 meters length of the northern portion of the site plan was our boundaries for constructing the apartment; splitting the connection between the southern yard and the street. With this regulation disconnecting the linkage between the yard and the street, the challenging part was to reconnect this fracture with a solution. We came up with a solution to lift up the greenery from the street level to the northern façade and to the roof and then again turning into the southern façade and at last rejoining with the garden in the yard. In other words the landscape is formed by linkage between the northern and southern façade and the roof.

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